Storm & disaster cleanup in Tampa Bay, safely and quickly

Treat every downed wire as live, even when the power is out, and report it to your utility; TECO and Duke Energy both take outage and line reports. Only qualified line-clearance crews should touch a tree that's on or near a power line. Portable generators add a hidden danger: one feeding back into house wiring without a proper transfer switch can energize lines that crews believe are dead.

Then there are the hazards that look harmless. A broken limb hanging in the canopy can drop without warning, and a trunk pinned under another tree can whip loose when it's cut, because it's loaded like a spring. Those cuts belong to people who do them regularly. Our crew walks the property before anyone starts a saw, decides what's safe to cut from the ground and in what order, and leaves anything that isn't.

In Hillsborough County, a tree that falls on private property and isn't blocking a public road or power lines is the property owner's to remove. Trees blocking roads go to the city or county, and anything tangled in lines goes to the utility. That first group covers most backyard storm damage: limbs across a driveway, a laurel oak on the back fence, a palm through a pool cage.

Storm damage doesn't automatically cancel tree rules. A damaged tree that's still standing may still need a removal permit where the city or county protects trees of its size. Under Florida Statute 163.045, you can remove a tree on a single-family lot without a local permit if you have signed documentation from your own ISA-certified arborist or a Florida-licensed landscape architect (Randoms doesn't provide these assessments) showing it poses an unacceptable risk. We work from that report, and we check with the city or county when a damaged tree is protected.

If you're using county or city pickup, sorting matters. FEMA guidance divides storm debris into six piles: vegetative debris, construction and demolition debris, appliances, electronics, household hazardous waste and normal garbage. Piles go at the curb, clear of trees, poles, hydrants and meters, and never in the road; Tampa asks for three feet of clearance from obstructions. Hillsborough crews pick up loose piles, not bagged debris or material left on the lawn. Our hurricane-season checklist keeps these sorting rules on one printable page.

There's a catch with hiring help: debris cut by a contractor often isn't eligible for curbside collection, so check your city's rules. We haul what we cut. Full haul-off also makes sense when you don't want a pile out front for weeks. After Helene and Milton, Hillsborough warned that collection could take months, and the county expected roughly five million cubic yards of debris.

Once debris is gone, the yard usually shows its real damage: ruts from fallen trunks, crushed shrubs, mulch washed into the lawn, dead patches where limbs sat for days. We grind the stumps of trees that came down through our stump grinding service, regrade the ruts, re-edge beds and replace mulch, and patch or re-sod turf that won't come back.

Coastal yards face one more problem. Where surge or flooding brings saltwater into a yard, a real risk in surge-exposed waterfront areas like Apollo Beach, UF/IFAS advises removing silt and debris right away and flushing the soil with fresh water, using gypsum only on soils confirmed to be sodic, and aerating compacted areas. Salt-burned plants can look worse before they recover, so it often pays to wait a few weeks before replacing anything that might still come back.

Be careful with promises about who pays. FEMA public assistance covers debris on public property; removing a tree from your own yard is a matter between you and your homeowner's insurance, and coverage varies by policy. We can't tell you what your insurer will pay, but we can give you before-and-after photos and a written estimate that describe the work clearly.

Pricing after a storm should look like pricing before one. During a declared state of emergency, Florida Statute 501.160 prohibits charging prices that are grossly out of line with the prior 30 days for essential goods and services. Our estimates are written before work starts and based on the same factors we use all year. And once your yard is back in shape, our hurricane preparation visit can make the next storm less work.